So, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
751–760 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#752[flagged]
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Please don't post dunks like this here. HN is for curious conversation and the guidelines ask us to be kind. We have no idea whether the thing they had in mind when they asked that question 8 years ago is relevant to what they think about the current topic. You could ask them rather than piling on like this.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#753[flagged]
Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#754> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him
I'm also criticizing you for not hiring the laid-off people at their former salary.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The “community” doesn’t decide what goes into the project, TailwindLabs does. Tailwind is not a community developed project. It’s a project that sometimes accepts outside contributors when they feel like it and the are under no obligation to do so. You did work that nobody from the project asked for and you’re throwing a fit because they have different priorities and said they don’t want it. They don’t owe you anything.
It seems you have fundamental misunderstanding of how open source works and now you’re throwing a fit because you’re an entitled brat.
Take the L. Learn a lesson. Grow and be better.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.
>Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? I, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.
That makes sense but doesn't answer "why do open source" though. In fact, it only shows that there is little incentive to pursue a serious open-source project and just stick to hobby projects while ackowledging it'll never go anywhere. I struggle to answer that myself.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the disruption comes from theft, is the business not viable?
Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.
Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#758Sad to hear. I have a Tailwind Plus license (when it was previously Tailwind UI). They are fantastic components and to be honest they keep me writing React even though I would rather not. Catalyst UI is too good.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#759> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization"
Who trusted you with hiring
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's presuming humans don't need money to feed themselves and continue to work.
That's neither here, nor there. AI is destined to destroy software industry , but not itself. Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it. The current degree…
You’re mostly right, libraries thrive by adapting to their surroundings. Mostly.
But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.
Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.